This Is How You Lose Her (Hardcover)

November 2012 Indie Next List

“Please believe me when I say that Diaz is one of our greatest living writers, and that This Is How You Lose Her is, in a word, stunning. In this, his second book of short stories, Diaz explores love in many of its manifestations and the ways in which we are prone to sabotaging ourselves. His prose is clear and compelling, his insight acute, and when I reached the last page I wanted to start all over again.”
— Amanda Hurley, Inkwood Books, Tampa, FL

Description

Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot DIaz's first book, "Drown," established him as a major new writer with "the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet" ("Newsweek"). His first novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," was named #1 Fiction Book of the Year" by "Time" magazine and spent more than 100 weeks on the "New York Times" bestseller list, establishing itself - with more than a million copies in print - as a modern classic. In addition to the Pulitzer, DIaz has won a host of major awards and prizes, including the National Book Critic's Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award.

Now DIaz turns his remarkable talent to the haunting, impossible power of love - obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love. On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover's washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness--and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, the stories in the "New York Times"-Bestselling "This Is How You Lose Her" lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that "the half-life of love is forever.

About the Author

Junot Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed "Drown"; "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao", which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and "This Is How You Lose Her", a "New York Times" bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, he is currently the fiction editor at "Boston Review" and "The""Rudge" and works as the Nancy Allen professor of writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.